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EMC has extended the data protection coverage of its DPA product by giving it the ability to monitor replication operations by servers and some EMC storage arrays.

DPA, Data Protection Advisor, is the name for the technology obtained by EMC when it bought WySDM in April last year. The idea is to monitor and advise on as many data protection processes as possible, including backup and, now, replication, so that data vulnerabilities can be identified and data protection operations assessed for effectiveness and completeness.

DPA v5.0 now monitors the activity of replication software on Symmetrix and CLARiiON arrays with a "unified graphical map of application clients, arrays, devices and replicas" to identify where replication is working and where it's not. There is also added support for EMC RecoverPoint network-based Replication and for graphical mapping of Celerra Replicator software relationships. This includes monitoring, alerting and reporting on CPU, memory, performance and capacity of Celerra arrays.

EMC has extended DPA to offer better deduplication activity reporting with improved Data Domain support. This includes reporting of system configuration, power, temperature and fan components. In a neat touch DPA reports and analyses deduplication ratios, and provides a unified view of deduplication ratios across Data Domain, Avamar and NetWorker backup products.

Lastly EMC has improved DPA's vCenter integration, "providing detailed backup monitoring, alerting and reporting for individual virtual machines and ESX servers." There are chargeback capabilities for backup and new chargeback support for RecoverPoint, which EMC claims makes it easier for enterprises to deliver private cloud services by accurate resource use reporting.

DPA v5.0 and its pretty fulsome set of improvements is available now. DPA rival Bocada says it's the market leader in the data protection management (DPM) space because its products manage more than 250,000 backup servers and clients, which, Bocada says, is the "largest installed base footprint of any DPM vendor."

Bocada promised replication support was coming back in 2007. It says it is actively developing a next-generation product that will "revolutionise the process of data protection service delivery." Aptare extended replication and VMware support of its Storage Console reporting products in April this year. ®